1 And now about meat that has been used in idolatrous worship. We all know, to be sure, what is the truth about it: but knowledge only breeds self-conceit, it is charity that binds the building together. 2 If anybody claims to have superior knowledge, it means that he has not yet attained the knowledge which is true knowledge; 3 it is only when a man loves God that God acknowledges him. 4 About meat, then, used in idolatrous worship, we can be sure of this, that a false god has no existence in the order of things; there is one God, and there can be no other. 5 Whatever gods may be spoken of as existing in heaven or on earth (and there are many such gods, many such lords), 6 for us there is only one God, the Father who is the origin of all things, and the end of our being; only one Lord, Jesus Christ, the creator of all things, who is our way to him.[1] 7 But it is not everybody who has this knowledge;[2] there are those who still think of such meat, while they eat it, as something belonging to idolatrous worship, with the thought of the false god in their minds; their conscience is not easy, and so incurs guilt. 8 And it is not what we eat that gives us our standing in God’s sight; we gain nothing by eating, lose nothing by abstaining; 9 it is for you to see that the liberty you allow yourselves does not prove a snare to doubtful consciences. 10 If any of them sees one who is better instructed sitting down to eat in the temple of a false god, will not his conscience, all uneasy as it is, be emboldened to approve of eating idolatrously? 11 And thus, through thy enlightenment, the doubting soul will be lost; thy brother, for whose sake Christ died. 12 When you thus sin against your brethren, by injuring their doubtful consciences, you sin against Christ. 13 Why then, if a mouthful of food is an occasion of sin to my brother, I will abstain from flesh meat perpetually, rather than be the occasion of my brother’s sin.

[1] ‘Who is our way to him’; this can also be rendered ‘And our creator too’, but it is hard to see why St Paul should have thought the addition necessary. He seems rather to be saying, ‘We draw our origin from the Father by way of Christ as Creator; and we must tend back to the Father by way of Christ as Mediator’.

[2] This is in apparent contradiction with verse 1, where it is said that all Christians have the knowledge in question. Possibly the doubtful consciences to which St Paul refers are those of heathens who are beginning to be attracted towards the faith, yet still retain a half-belief in their false gods. Or possibly ‘we all’ in verse 1 refers to the Gentile Christians, and the doubtful consciences are those of Jewish Christians, who still feel themselves bound by the rule laid down in Ac. 15.29; in which case the position here is much the same as that considered in Rom. 14. The principle, in either case, is that a man is bound to follow his own conscience, and we must sometimes abstain from what our own conscience finds harmless, lest our example should give scandal to one whose conscience is differently formed. ‘With the thought of the false god in their minds’; some manuscripts in the Greek read ‘through being accustomed to (the worship of) false gods’.